Why Do You Hate Your Father?
Denise Mills
Word Count 1032
When I was ten years old, I asked my mother why she didn’t get a divorce. “Why do you hate your father so much?” she asked, her eyes wide. I shook my head in response and walked away, thinking to myself: Why the hell wouldn’t I?
My father always wore a similar outfit: polished leather boots, a button-up collared shirt, and an expensive Akubra hat that hid a widening bald spot. His jeans were ironed by my mother with an intentional crease and fell loose over non-existent buttocks, held up by a brown leather belt below a prominent beer belly. The skin on his right-hand index and middle fingers was stained yellow to the knuckle from his two packs of Winfield Red per day, as though coloured by yellow highlighter.
After injuring his back in a work accident when I was two, my father quit his labourer job, and the family lived off my mother’s full-time administration wage, while she continued her role as sole housekeeper and child-rearer. From this point onwards, my father’s entitled behaviour was excused by my mother’s overused phrase: “It’s just the pain talking.” But The Pain was selective with its audience, and there were people who thought my father was quite the gentleman.
The family dynamics were that anything my mother, sister, brother, or I needed came a distant second to my father’s wants: alcohol, cigarettes, regular trips to the pub, and the occasional indulgence in takeaway. His favourite was the McDonald’s triple cheeseburger, which he’d order in the drive-thru then pull over to eat while the rest of the family waited empty-handed, the meaty smell permeating the enclosed space of our station wagon. I watched from the backseat as he licked the grease from his fingers.
Dad’s carefree spending habits were balanced elsewhere in the family budget; for years, Mum toted a plastic shopping bag in lieu of a handbag for her keys, lipstick, and purse. Other signs could be seen from our home-scissored fringes, patched-up clothing, and my brother’s white sneakers that Mum painted black to meet the public school uniform requirements. “I didn’t care about the bullies,” my brother said when we reflected on this recently. “Whatever they did to me was never as bad as what I got at home.”
Every morning, my father read two newspapers while my mother rushed to make children’s lunches, find missing socks, and get ready for her nine-to-five office job. As part of her morning routine, she’d place Dad’s Rice Bubbles and milk in front of him and pour his coffee to the imaginary line he insisted upon. In the evenings, she refereed three fighting children and cooked two dinners: something for my father – steak and kidney pie, lamb cutlets, beef and bacon casserole; and a cheaper, easier option for the kids – meatloaf, pasta, or tomato soup. Her own dinners consisted of running a spoon around the inside of an already scraped-out saucepan of instant mashed potato, which she’d consume standing in the kitchen.
After dinner, my father wandered outdoors, where he spent his evenings leaning on the side fence and watching the neighbours. Every hour or two he’d ring the doorbell or bang on an outer wall of the house, which meant he wanted another beer brought to him. Mum would drop what she was doing and rush to the fridge with an urgency that infuriated me. Beer in hand, she’d move in hurried footsteps shortened by stiletto heels she wore until bedtime, unless mowing the lawn.
Heels were important because Dad hated women who wore flat shoes, or worse – no shoes. He also hated women with short hair, and women in movies who screamed and grunted during childbirth, which he deemed “unnecessary and unattractive”. This perhaps explains why my mother chose to give birth to all three of her children alone, while the already-born kids were shipped off to our grandmother. Dad, I guess, went to the pub. “I wouldn’t have wanted him there,” she said when I asked her about it. In their twenty-five years of marriage, this was the closest she ever came to complaining about him.
While my mother went to great lengths to placate my father, it was a fool’s game. Inevitably, he’d perceive something had gone wrong, and would expel waves of frustration on those around him. He’d call her “idiot” for her daily transgressions, from not producing the name of a neighbour he himself had forgotten (“Whatshisname! You know bloody well who I’m talking about!”), to not cooking his dinner the exact way he liked it. I recall one meal deemed particularly unworthy thrown across the room, my mother on hands and knees cleaning casserole from walls and floor saying, “I’ll make you something else, I’ll make you something else.”
Most evenings, my father was kind to my mother and would call her beautiful. He said it with a slight tilt of the head and an expectant look that I read as, “Aren’t I a lovely man?” Somehow, my mother thought that was enough.
When my mother was forty-nine, she was digging up the hard ground out the front of the house with a garden hoe, while my father stood behind her and shouted that she was doing it wrong, and that she needed to put her back into it. She tried to muster more strength than she had to appease him, swung the hoe with the force of her entire body, and thought she’d popped a muscle in her chest when a raised, purplish bruise appeared on her right breast the next day. After visiting the doctor, she was told the cancer had been growing for quite a while, and she died ten months later.
At the funeral, well-intentioned acquaintances comforted my father by speaking in reverential tones of his “wonderful” twenty-five year marriage. Standing at the edge of the conversation, I offered a polite smile and thought: Is it wonderful to suffer through life until you die? To give until there’s nothing left?
It wouldn’t make a scrap of difference, but I would like to travel back in time to 1989, to the day my ten-year-old self asked my mother why she didn’t get a divorce. When she asks, “Why do you hate your father so much?” I’ll reply: “I just think that your life matters, too.”
Denise writes to save herself from existential crisis. Her nonfiction has been featured in Brevity, Epoch, Complete Sentence Lit, and many other publications. She lives in the regional village of Millthorpe, Australia, with no pets but plenty of books.